CityLab Daily: Alternative Homeownership, Explained

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What We’re Following

Game of homes: Most Americans approach the housing market as a choice between either renting or owning. But there’s a third way: the shared-equity model. This alternative form of ownership offers benefits that traditional markets cannot, such as allowing for long-term housing affordability and letting low- and moderate-income families build equity. Shared equity comes in a few different forms, such as community land trusts and housing co-ops.

Madison Johnson/CityLab

By either selling and renting units on land owned by community nonprofits or selling shares of a co-owned building, these tools create opportunities to take housing out of the speculative market, and to serve people shut out of traditional markets. In the latest edition of our explanatory series, CityLab University, Benjamin Schneider explains the history of shared-equity housing in the United States and how it works, and imagines how it could become a bigger part of the housing ecosystem. Today on CityLab: How Land Trusts and Co-ops Work